Ministry of Defence Website Not Hacked or Defaced, Says MeitY

The Defence Ministry’s official website was hacked on Friday, forcing the government to initiate action to restore the site. A Chinese character appeared on top of the page when website www.mod.gov.in was opened. Later, the words “the site cannot be reached” and “please try again” appeared on the home page.

Minutes later, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman took to Twitter to say: “Action is initiated after the hacking of MoD website. “The website shall be restored shortly. Needless to say, every possible step required to prevent any such eventuality in the future will be taken,” she said.

Update: The National Informatics Centre’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Twitter handle soon after said the Ministry of Defence website hadn’t been hacked, however, a technical issue caused the site to go down. MeitY said the offending Chinese character showed the default logo of the Drupal Zen Framework.

“https://mod.gov.in is NOT HACKED. There is some technical issue since 2:30PM today. Drupal theme https://www.drupal.org/project/zen framework. The site displayed the default logo,” the NIC MeitY tweet read.